Sharing the Experience

Every time I am out with my EPIC taking a gigapan, I am asked by, and share with others, what I’m doing. They look out with me, see the vista and nod, ooh and ahh over the robotic panohead’s precise movements, and say, “How cool. I’ll check it out,” before heading off. The taking is super cool (especially in the hands of much more talented photographers). However, I am usually left wistfully watching their parting heels, hoping: “Please do! I really hope you check it out”. For me, you see, the magic that goes into a fantastic Gigapan image is revealed when it is shared.

Sharing takes off once you upload an image to gigapan.com. As a logged-in Gigapan Basic member, you facilitate maximum sharing by going to the Edit option found under your image and editing your image’s settings as follows: uncheck “Is private” and check “Allow others to embed this gigapan?”, “Allow others to add this gigapan to galleries?”, and “Allow others to print this gigapan?”.

When your gigapan is public, site visitors can find it using the gigapan.com search. It will appear in the “Most Recent” image listing and, if viewed enough, the “Most Popular”. You can improve your image’s search performance (working toward that most popular ranking) by adding your own tags and selecting relevant categories from your image’s Edit page.

Public gigapans can be socially shared by you and site visitors with friends and connections. When a site visitor clicks on the Share icon she can post your image to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more. Some of our most viewed images grew popular after spreading virally through social sharing sites. And, just recently, we introduced the ability to post an image viewer directly onto a person’s Facebook Timeline. Try it; it’s pretty satisfying, especially the full screen view!

Allowing others to embed your gigapan takes sharing to the next level. With this setting enabled, a site visitor can generate, copy, and paste an iFrame embed script into a blog or website he controls so that others see, explore, and zoom in on your image beyond the bounds of gigapan.com. Views of embedded gigapans account for over a fifth of Gigapan image traffic.

Sharing the experience of exploration, discovery, and Wow! that a Gigapan image contains in its billions of pixels expands the view and perspective of every person who lands in the midst of an image. I hope they land on yours! What are some of your favorite shared gigapan experiences?

No comments:

ABOUT US

Gigapan inspires and connects the world by empowering people to experience, create, store, share and monetize remarkable HD imagery by providing an ecosystem of hardware, software, viewers and developer tools.